Paul Simmons
Blues rock guitarist and songwriter of forty years. Web hosting technologist of twenty-five. Two signal chains, one habit of keeping things running.
Two trades, one signal path
Everything here moves through a chain. Pick to string, string to amp, amp to room. Or request to server, server to network, network to screen. Get every link right and nobody notices. Get one wrong and everybody does.
I've spent four decades chasing the first kind of chain, playing blues rock in bands and on my own, writing songs and recording them. I've spent twenty-five years maintaining the second, running hosting infrastructure for a small circle of clients who'd rather not think about DNS. Most weeks, both happen on the same evening.
The music
Blues rock is home ground. I cut my teeth fronting a trio called The Blue Rider, working a rotating set of twenty-five songs through a residency at a local rock club, and I've kept writing ever since. The catalogue now runs to around thirty original songs, two full albums and a single released under my own name.
More recently that's grown into Paulo, a project built around AI-generated backing tracks that I pull apart into stems, then rebuild with live guitar and vocals in Logic Pro. It's a strange way to make a blues record, but the songs still have to hold up on a single amp in a small room, so that's still the test I use.
The hosting side
Before it was a hobby that got out of hand, it was a small hosting reseller business, and it still is. I've been running it for a quarter of a century, which in internet years is closer to geological time. Clients get a site that stays up, a mailbox that keeps working and someone who answers when something breaks.
Outside client work, I run my own network the same way: managed router, wired backbone, self-hosted where it makes sense. If a job needs someone equally comfortable with a signal chain and a network diagram, that's the overlap this site is pointing at.
Get in touch
Gig enquiry, a question about a track, or something hosting-related that needs a second pair of hands — any of those is a good reason to write.
Contact me